Monthly Archives: February 2010

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So, a customer called to report another no interactive network license available problem. We quickly narrowed it down to a problem with the license server: it wouldn’t start. Start Server said “Server started successfully”, but Perform Status Enquiry said FLEXnet Licensing error:-15,570. Everything about the license file checked out ok: it had the right MAC address, it had the right computer name, it had the right license features. But still the server wouldn’t start.

I was already WebEx’d into the customer’s computer, so I downloaded Process Monitor and used it to track what LMTOOLS was doing when I clicked Start Server.

When you click Start Server, lmtools.exe starts the service lmgrd.exe, so I filtered for all Processes that started with “lm”.

Scrolling down through the log, I soon saw a possible problem: repeated NAME NOT FOUND entries for the same file:

To check whether LMTOOLS eventually did find the protocol file, I right-clicked “C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\protocol” and clicked Include, to include only the log entries for the protocol file.

And sure enough, the protocol file was never found. So I copied over the protocol file from my system, and then I was able to start the license server.

Without Process Monitor, the only clue I had was this one line in the LMTOOLS debug log file:

How do you get rid of a reference material library when you don’t need it anymore in a scene? If you try to delete it, you just get this message “ERROR : Invalid procedure call or argument: ‘DeleteObj’ “.

To delete a reference material library, you have to unlock it first:

– Open the explorer.
– Change the scope to Materials.
– Right-click the reference material library, click Locks, and then click Unlock all levels.
– Now you can delete the reference material library.

Install the corresponding version of pywin32.
For example, if you installed Python 2.5 on 32-bit Windows, then install pywin32-212.win32-py2.5.exe.

Check that the Python path is included in your PATH system environment variable.
If your PATH doesn’t include the Python install folder, then Python won’t show up in Softimage.

You can get the 64-bit versions (Linux and Windows) of Python for Softimage here.

The most recent install of pywin32 determines which version of Python is available in Softimage. If your version of pywin32 doesn’t match up to an installed version of Python, then Python won’t show up in Softimage.

Just set up a render tree on the point cloud that uses an image sequence, and then use an ICE attribute to drive the Time Source of the image sequence.

First, here’s a basic render tree for the point cloud:

In the ICE Tree for the point cloud, you can set up an attribute that will be used as the Time Source for the image sequence. For example, suppose you wanted to randomly display a sprite from a sequence. In the ICE Tree, you could put a random number in an attribute for each particle.

Then you could use that attribute to drive the Time Source of the image sequence:

– In the ICE Tree, edit the Emit from Surface compound
– Edit the Generate Points compound
– Open the PPG for Generate Sample Set.
– Under Filter, click Explorer and locate the IsElement attribute of the cluster.

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